Effective C++, Third Edition

8. Customizing new and delete

In these days of computing environments boasting built-in support for garbage collection (e.g., Java and .NET), the manual C++ approach to memory management can look rather old-fashioned. Yet many developers working on demanding systems applications choose C++ because it lets them manage memory manually. Such developers study the memory usage characteristics of their software, and they tailor their allocation and deallocation routines to offer the best possible performance (in both time and space) for the systems they build.

Doing that requires an understanding of how C++'s memory management routines behave, and that's the focus of this chapter. The two primary players in the game are the allocation and deallocation ...